1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a document information management method and apparatus, and more particularly to a document information management method and apparatus capable of sharing document information via a computer network.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the recent spread of computer networks, individuals can supply information directly to anyone. For example, each individual can transmit information to the whole world by using electronic news, electronic mails, WWW and the like. By publicizing individual information, it becomes easy to appeal the characteristics and performance of the individual. Intellectual productivity of a society can be improved by sharing publicized individual performance, information, know-how and knowledge.
Computer networks can be used as infrastructures for information sharing. With the developments in networking, the infrastructures of information sharing have been reorganized progressively. Although reorganization of infrastructures is necessary for information sharing, it does not necessarily result in promotion of information sharing.
Intellectual productivity of the whole group can only be improved by publicizing and sharing the information, knowledge, know-how and the like which have been individually stored and managed by each member of the group to improve the intellectual productivity of each member.
Electronic bulletin boards, Internet home pages and the like are used for information sharing on computer networks. The person who publicized information can know to some extent the response of publicized information from the number of accesses to the publicized information. A conventional information sharing system is, however, associated with the problem that people do not positively register their contents. This is because document registration processes are complicated or registration destination selection is complicated and difficult.
In order to solve this problem, techniques have been proposes as disclosed in JP-A-2000-89991. According to this disclosure, folders are classified into a plurality of hierarchical levels and a user is supplied with services in response to a folder automatic classification request sent from the user. Another approach is disclosed in JP-A-9-311805 which facilitates a work of selecting a file suitable for storing a new document and a work of selecting a folder suitable for searching a document satisfying a desired query expression.